Don’t Self-Inflict Another Obstacle

After years of struggling with black student underachievement, the Oakland school board has just confessed to an “F” grade for its efforts and declared that it wants to attack the twin ills of illiteracy and verbal incompetence in English, epidemic among its black student population, by classifying “black English,” or “Ebonics,” as a second language of instruction. This we-can’t-teach-’em-so-we-be- joinin’-’em surrender was the school board’s first step in an attempt to qualify Ebonics for the same federal funds that fortify other bilingual education programs.

The U.S. Department of Education promptly rejected the novel idea. Ebonics--a crossing of “ebony” and “phonics”--is nothing more than a linguistic sham that, with porcine gluttony, vacuum-sucks every verbal deformity from plantation patois to black slang, from rap to hip hop, from jive to crippled English, and serves up the resultant gumbo as “black English.” The school board’s plan to use it in the classroom is retrograde in the extreme and insults the memory of valiant slave ancestors who made enormous sacrifices to try to learn the English language. Educating slaves was an illegal activity; if discovered reading or being tutored, they were maimed or put to death in keeping with provisions of the slavery laws of the day.

What is appalling about the Oakland plan is the absolutely backward logic that supports it. Toni Cook, president of the Oakland Board of Education, asserts that, “Ebonics is a genetically based language structure” with origins in Africa. That is absolutely false. Professors of African language and literature in America’s universities consider Ebonics to be nothing more than an urban language phenomenon, unique for its limited, enigmatic contexts, its fleeting definitions and its ever-present counterculture connotations. It is an American construction, neither known nor spoken anywhere in the huge continent of Africa.

Hovering over this proposal is the specter of preferential hiring: Who would be considered “acceptable” to teach Ebonics--teachers of any race or only black teachers? And where, we must wonder, would the Oakland schools find the materials for teaching this pseudo-language, which has no textbooks, no verb conjugations, no reliable spellings, no rules and no documentation?

As a black American myself, I find truly surprising and disheartening Cook’s use of the term “genetically based.” Certain much-maligned, contemporary writers with names like Jensen, Shockley and Murray have often been accused of using these identical words to assert that blacks are an inferior race from whom very little good can be expected.

The Oakland plan is nothing more than inverted racism. Like drive-by gang shootings and riot-inspired community burndowns, it is one more example of how black people can commit acts of racism against themselves.

By proposing this plantation-era plan, the school board promotes a form of segregation that will only make its black students prisoners of their own achievements. Separate has never been, nor will it ever be, equal. Black students need to renounce Ebonics for the fraud that it is and become aggressively involved with their teachers and other students in learning standard English.

To succeed in the 21st century, all of the children in school today in this country will need to speak and write not only English proficiently; they will also need to know other languages. The safety and security of their future will depend on how well they communicate and get along with each other.

Standard English will continue to be the primary language of higher education in America and the common language of trade and commerce in the global village.

An African, Kofi Annan of Ghana, is the newly elected secretary-general of the United Nations. His rise to this lofty world leadership position ought to be viewed by the Oakland school board as a unique learning opportunity: He is a black role model, an American-educated economist who speaks flawless English and other languages--Ebonics not among them.